my fault completely,” he said dryly. At least arguing was a distraction.
“A baby was born in here, you know,” Olivia said suddenly. “In the forties. An unmarried maid was trying to work as long as she could, and the baby came early. She named her Callie, too.”
He blinked, momentarily confused. “And this has what to do with me locking us in the broom closet?”
Silence. “Nothing,” she said finally, and the embarrassment in her tone produced a stab of guilt. “Just something I thought you might find interesting. I guess you don’t want to hear about the Balinese sword swallowers who were here in the early sixties.”
He laughed out loud at that. “You are quite a surprise, Olivia Callender.”
She was, too. A bit more every minute. It was a miracle that she’d let him kiss her neck earlier, for starters. He was moving fast, especially for someone like Olivia, and he knew it. But a tiger didn’t change his stripes, and he wasn’t sure he wanted to try.
He was honest, at least. It was part of the reason he liked food, in fact. Food didn’t lie. An apple was an apple, however you sliced it.
The thing was he thought Olivia was, too. After the women he’d encountered in L.A., especially, she was a breath of fresh air.
He hadn’t expected it, the women. Sure, there’d always been some, food groupies for Christ’s sweet sake, at the restaurants in London. But L.A. was a whole new kettle of fish. One that had been left out in the California sun, too.
The competition had been bad enough. The producers had prided themselves on their mad challenges. A fusion of Italian and Asian cooking—for breakfast. A lunch menu for six-year-olds featuring mushrooms and broccoli. A wedding reception menu for a hundred—on a five-hundred-dollar budget.
Wankers, he thought darkly. As if most chefs had to face any of those particular issues. Still, he’d made it to the finale—on sheer will power alone, he sometimes thought. There weren’t many people you could trust not to stab you in the back when two hundred thousand dollars was at stake. In fact, there were exactly none. Not that he’d expected to trust anyone in the first place—his mother, and later Clodagh, had taught him the folly of that long ago. But it was still a bit of a shock to find himself swarmed with women who made Barbie dolls look natural. Not a genuine thing about one of them, from their breasts to their noses to their motives.
But Olivia…Olivia was nothing but real. Just the memory of her blinking at him on that sidewalk was enough to make him grin. She hadn’t a shred of artifice in her bones. He liked that.
And if she asked outright, he’d have to admit to her that he hadn’t been wandering around the hotel only because he couldn’t sleep. He’d been lying in that lonely bed upstairs, and every time he closed his eyes he’d seen her face.
Stunned and scared when her uncle made his nasty threat. Determined when she announced in the bar that the bloke would never take the hotel away from her.
And his brain had spun into gear again, clicking through everything he’d seen of the hotel, everything Olivia probably needed to change to make the place a success—all the ways he could help her save it, not that she’d asked, or he’d ever done anything remotely like it before.
And he’d known he had to get a look at the Coach and Four kitchen, when no one was about to interrupt him. He was a chef, after all. If she was going to pull this rotting old mausoleum out of the trash heap, that was one of the places to start.
Not that he’d planned to call it a rotting old mausoleum, of course. Not to her face. It wasn’t lying if you simply omitted part of the truth.
He was no white knight. Nothing humble about that, just plain truth. But Olivia…what was it about Olivia that had him stumbling all over himself to come to her rescue?
He already knew all the reasons why he wanted to kiss her. And touch her. And listen to her sigh…
Stifling a groan, he moved away from the door. Christ, he had to piss. That last glass of beer after dinner had been a mistake, not that he’d expected to be stuck in a closet overnight.
He expelled a noisy sigh, and he heard Olivia shifting her position on the floor.
“I think you’re going to kill me,” she said matter-of-factly.
He blinked. “Kill you? Why?”
“Because I just remembered that there’s a transom over this door.”
He could practically feel her blushing. “A transom, yeah?”
“Yeah.” She bumped into something and mumbled, “Ouch.”
“Shouldn’t it be a bit brighter in here with a window over the door?” he said absently, turning to reach as high as he could above the door.
“It’s wooden,” she explained, and he felt her, soft and warm, beside him. “It still cranks open, I think, but no one ever uses it. We’d need a ladder, though, and I think there’s one against the back wall…”
“Hold on,” he said through gritted teeth. He’d find the sodding ladder if he had to trip over every bucket and mop in the place, and break both legs to do it. If there was a transom up above that door, he was going through it.
Before he exploded.
“I’m sorry,” she repeated, as he clattered past God only knew what, pawing the air for anything metal with rungs.
“What are you sorry for, love?” His knuckles scraped against something solid and cool. Bingo!
“For not remembering sooner.” She sounded humiliated and very small in the darkness. “We could have been out of here hours ago.”
They wouldn’t have been in here in the first place if the bloody door wasn’t broken, but he wasn’t going to remind her of that. Not her fault, he told himself as he maneuvered the ladder—none too gracefully—through the cramped space. Something crashed to the floor and Olivia yelped.
“Not to worry,” he said as he propped the ladder against the door. “If you’d remembered earlier we wouldn’t have played getting to know you.”
Brilliant, the way he could feel her blushing in the dark.
“Stand back now,” he said as he set his foot on the lowest rung. “I don’t know how sturdy this thing is.”
“Rhys, no!” Her fingers closed tentatively around his calf. “Let me do it. I’m smaller than you are, for one thing. I don’t want you to hurt yourself. Or, well, get even stucker.”
No chance. He reached down to untangle her fingers. “I don’t think so, love. For one, whoever goes through needs to do it backward. You’re not about to dive headfirst out of the transom, are you? And I’m taller. When I drop, the fall won’t be so far.”
He hesitated when she was silent. It made sense, didn’t it? Not that he relished the idea of twisting into some pretzel of a position to get his legs through the thing first.
When she spoke, she sounded doubtful. “Okay. But I’m beginning to feel a little too much like the proverbial damsel in distress
